


Ghost in the Machine

by everheartings



Category: Tomorrowland (2015)
Genre: Cyborg!AU, F/M, First Love, androids learning to feel
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-05-30
Updated: 2015-05-30
Packaged: 2018-04-02 00:19:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,782
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4040188
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/everheartings/pseuds/everheartings
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>She is Man. She is Machine.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Ghost in the Machine

**Author's Note:**

> Tomorrowland was something of a hot mess, but Athena was a literal angel. And so, we get this.
> 
> (there is more on the tagging of ship in the end notes, but if anyone is concerned, let me assure you that no one so much as even kisses, and only Athena's feelings are addressed in depth.)

_New York World’s Fair, 1964_

The tulle beneath her skirt is itchy against the backs of her thighs and the ribbon tying up her hair is much too tight. She does not mind. She has not been programmed to mind. David sits at the helm of the long table, waiting for inspiration to arrive. Inventor after inventor show off their contraptions, and none of their machines suit him. She stands in the corner and no one pays her any mind.

     They called her Athena. The goddess of wisdom. They gave her the face of a child and the best fiber optics money could buy. They slipped two pretty blue eyes in her sockets, tugged her arms into a pale blue dress, and opened up her skull to tinker with the circuits in her brain.

     Some man brings in a machine meant to uncork bottles of champagne. Athena blinks as the man, bald and sweating, fiddles with the screws. From the open doors of the hall comes a great creak, a metal _thunk_ , and a tiny human voice saying, “Excuse me.” Athena’s head snaps around— _correction: slower, smoother, more human_ —and she sees a duffel with a boy’s legs moving towards David. It heaves itself onto the table, and then untangles itself. _A boy and a duffel, not a boy-duffel. Noted._

     David is not impressed by Frank Walker, but Athena’s programming is. This boy lights up the wires in her brain and sets her into motion. She has a program to execute and this boy is the key. She presses the pin into his hand—her first—and says “Follow me. Do try to keep up.” Later, after she is rewarded by the sight of him flying above her, then crashing down to earth, she smiles and takes his hand in hers.

_Cape Canaveral, Florida, 2013_

Athena knows this girl is the one by the way she uses her brother’s toy helicopter to shut off the cameras. The resourcefulness makes the wires beneath her skin flicker. She feels the electricity snapping through her joints, making her fingers twitch. With her eyes calibrated to human specifications, she can’t see the wires, no matter how long she stares. It might be easier to know herself if she could.

     She watches the sparks fly from each engine the girl fries. The naivety in the actions is almost touching. Athena has seen worlds— _a world_ —rise and fall, and she knows that the future is certain. A handful of broken machines will change nothing. She has not been programmed to hope. She is not able to feel hope. That is what she tells herself.

     But there is a program running in her brain, compelling her forward. She recruits. Athena pulls a hair from the girl’s helmet and is rewarded with a flake of scalp clinging to the thin strand. The slightest breath and it would be blown away. It is good then that Athena has no need for breathing.

     She flips open her case and eleven empty spaces greet her. One pin left. It takes little time to code it to the girl’s DNA, just half of a minute. Athena knows how long thirty seconds can be, but here in Florida, with the night filled with nothing but the looming threat of destruction, the seconds pass in a blink of an eye. Athena tucks the pin into the girl’s helmet. It won’t be long before the chase begins. 

     Casey Newton. The final recruit. She’d stared at the stars back at the launch pad, before running back to her motorcycle. There is something to her face, the clear eyes and untouched smile, that reminds Athena of simpler days.

_Tomorrowland, 1964_

“Frank Walker is a genius,” the animatronic specialists tell her as they root beneath her skin, and Athena believes it. It has been a month since her creation and already she is being updated. It is a new frontier. _Frank Walker is a genius_. She does not come up with the idea herself, but she tells him anyways.

     They are alone and Frank is tinkering with a stabilizing system for his jetpack. It’s taken him only a week to adjust to life in Tomorrowland. Athena has not been programmed to feel pleased. But still her lips pull up on the ends, a show of emotion she does not feel, not in the human sense.

     “Frank Walker, you are a genius,” she says. Frank looks up from his lab station. She watches color rush to his skin, red unfurling across his cheeks. Blood, trying to make itself seen. _Blushing, a physical response to an emotional stimulus, such as anger, embarrassment, or romantic affection._ _Noted._

     “Why do you say that?” he asks, glancing up to meet her eyes.

     Athena blinks. “Because you are. No one else could construct a jetpack using scrap metal.”

    “Sure they could. It’s just that no one else thought to try.” Frank smiles, and when Athena responds with one of her own— _cheeks up, lips part, just a hint of teeth_ —he ducks his head. He beckons her with the slightest curl of his fingers. If she did not have eyes strong enough to capture the respiration of a butterfly, she would not have seen it. “Come here,” he says, “Help me with this.”

     Athena crosses the room and stands beside him. She’s nearly a head taller than him and looks over his right shoulder. He has a laser cutter in his right hand and is holding down a circuit board with his left. There in his hands is the stuff of her brains, her bones, her heart. He holds her whole self and does not even know it.

     “Hold this corner down,” Frank instructs, tapping the bottom right. Athena places one index finger against the corner. She presses down and she knows that there will be no more movement, not from her end. Frank laughs and her eyes shift up from her finger to look at him. “You’ll need to use more fingers than that.”

     Athena moves two more fingers to the board— _correction_ —and says, “Like this?” But Frank already has his goggles on and is working at the thin veins of metal. Here is the new frontier. This is the future.

     Frank’s hand twitches and the laser flicks across the board. His nose wrinkles and he adjusts his grip. It takes several minutes more until he’s satisfied. Athena’s hands are still the whole while. “There, you can let go,” he says at last, and leans back.

     Athena lifts her hand and on the tip of her index finger is a drop of blood. It slips down her skin, hot and wet. She stares at it. She had not been programmed to bleed. “Oh,” she says and Frank catches sight of the blood on her hand.

     As he wraps a Band-Aid around her finger, Frank asks why she didn’t tell him she’d been cut. She crosses her ankles and bites her lip. The stick of adhesive is unfamiliar against her skin. “I didn’t know,” she says, and leaves it at that.

_Texas, 2013_

Athena rescues the girl in a hail of lasers and fists. She does not hesitate to kill the animatronics—once, they would have been a brother, a sister, but now they’re twisted metal across the street. She does not think of the moment of detonation as she puts her fist through the window of a car. Pushes Casey over to the passenger seat. Drives.

     “If you keep asking questions,” she says to the girl, “My automatic shut-off will be activated.”

     If Athena was human she would be tired, but she is animatronic, so she is not. That does nothing to explain the weight in her chest and the ache just below the curvature of her ribs. Casey asks another question and Athena powers down in the space of a second. Rest, of a kind.

     When she reboots, she loads back into herself. It feels like she experiences all her memories at once, flickering against the dark of her eyelids. _The World’s Fair. Frank Walker. A woman laughing, wiping dirt from her cheek. Too tight ribbons. Her skull, open and wires out. Frank Walker. A green field and bare feet. Opening her eyes and seeing David at her bedside. Blood from her finger. A blue dress. Frank Walker. The grill of a car._

_And you are Athena._

     Casey jumps from the car and Athena follows. No one taught her to look both ways before crossing the road. She just catches the reflection of light on the metal grill before the truck slams into her. A memory of another kind. Her body remembers what it is to collapse, remembers the bite of the asphalt across her cheek.

     She is hit by a truck and does not die. She reboots, again. Wipes the blood from her lips.

     “Where are we going?” Casey asks when Athena is once again behind the wheel.

     Athena’s fingers twitch and she keeps her eyes on the road. Her chest is tight in a way too human to be real. “I’m taking you to see Frank Walker.”

     _Frank Walker._ She wants to see him again, but not the disgust that will be on his face. Why do you hate me so? The thought flickers across her circuitry. She blinks, surprised, and swerves on the road. Questions are not written into her program

     She drives circles around a corn field until Casey falls asleep. She kicks the girl out of the car and leaves. Athena tells herself that it is logical to do this—her presence would only anger Frank further, shut him tighter inside himself. Cowardice is not in her programming. She presses the gas and does not look back.

_Tomorrowland, 1966_

Athena watches Frank Walker laugh, his lips pulling back and his shoulders shaking. _Laughter_ , _the contraction of the diaphragm resulting in audible sound, in response to external stimuli. An expression of a variety of emotions including happiness, confusion, or relief. Noted._

     She’d said something funny again. She hadn’t meant to, but Frank finds her seriousness amusing. She does not laugh. It is not in her programming. It is a sound she does not have the ability to replicate.

     “You’re too serious, Athena,” he says.

     “I’m the right amount of serious.” She tempers her words with a smile.

     Frank laughs again and takes her hand, pulling her to the newly installed hover-rail. He’s taller now, just by an inch or two. There’s a newness to the way their lips line up and she can look him in the eye without tilting down her head. His voice cracks sometimes and he blushes. Frank Walker is growing up and she is growing older. It is not the same thing, Athena finds.

     Her skin receptors pick up the damp warmth of human sweat on her palm. Frank Walker is nervous. She glances over to him and his smile wobbles, in the shy way she’s seen before—there were two animatronic specialists who smiled at each other like that. When she asked David about it he’d frowned and had one transferred to a different department.

     Athena’s rib cage squeezes and her wiring shifts in her chest as room is made for something else to beat. She stumbles— _correction: feet stabilize, correction: feet stabilize, correction: feet stabil_ —Frank catches her. She feels his hands wrap around her waist, and a memory unfolds in front of her eyes, played back like a film she cannot quite remember. _A man, tall and laughing, grabs her waist and spins her around in a kitchen. A woman smiling at the stove top. Warmth, happiness, spreading through her body. Laughter, rolling from her lips._

     Athena finds herself pressed against Frank’s chest, close enough to hearing the rapid thudof his heart.

     “I got you,” he says and his shy smile is back.

     Athena swallows. There is a bird in her chest, fluttering about. She feels hot. “Thank you,” she says, and when she smiles, it too is shy.

     Later that day, when she is lying on the steel table in the white room, the animatronic specialists ask her if she has any glitches to report. Animatronics do not feel emotions. Empathetic responses are generated through programming—simulated fondness, but nothing more. _Warmth on her waist where his hands had rested. Warmth in her chest._

     “Nothing to report,” she says.

_Paris, France, 2013_

Paris spreads out below them, a sea of twinkling lights they could sail away on if the world wasn’t coming to an end. Frank is crouched behind her, close enough so she feels his breath on her neck receptors. Frank is older now, taller now, but his eyes are the same. He looks at her like she hurts him and Athena does not know how to fix it.

     Casey steps around the corner and Athena remembers how slow thirty seconds can be.

     Her hands twitch as the wiring in her chest shifts again, fiber optics pressing up against her ribs. She plays back a memory. The car ride over to the teleportation machine had been tense. Athena could only steal quick glances at Frank, map his new face from a hundred tiny puzzle pieces. Frank had not needed to look at her. She had not changed. Grown older, but not up.

     Casey had fallen asleep on his shoulder. Frank’s scowl deepened and he turned to look out the window. It’d been nothing but fields for the past twenty minutes, and would be nothing but fields for another ten. Athena swallowed and focused back to the road.

     “Are you even old enough to drive?”

     Athena blinked. Frank was looking at her from the corner of his eyes. Her chest gave another squeeze.

     “Of course I am,” she said. “I’m nearly fifty.”

     Casey’s voice comes from around the corner, loud and bright and full of hope. “Human!” Frank stands, and Athena can hear the muffled creak as he unbends his knees.

     “Come on,” he says, “Let’s go.” Athena nods. Thirty seconds is not nearly long enough to replay the curve of Frank’s smile as he stared out the window and tried not to laugh.

_Tomorrowland, 1983_

     Frank builds a machine that can move through time, from the very birth of the universe to its very end. And when he sees its end, a point he never thought they would reach, his hands shake so bad that they spin back five hundred years. Athena watches as he collapses in on himself, knees folding beneath him, forehead touching the floor and hands tugging at his hair.  On the screens, Jane Grey cannot find the executioner’s block on which to lay her head.

     She sits herself beside him. He is taller than her now and she has to look up to see him, but when she sits next to him like this, he is smaller once again. She and David look the same, thanks to shakes and circuitry. Over breakfast she sucks up air through a straw that leads to an empty cup as Frank eats his eggs. He does not chase eternal youth and he frowns at the cup in her hand. She does not tell him that she was youth eternal long before David put it into shakes.

     Her hands slide out and she wraps her fingers around his wrists. She tugs his hands from his hair, presses them to his chest. The only sound in the room is the shuddering of his breath and the scrap of an ancient axe on a grindstone. Athena pulls his head to her lap, his cheek soft against her thighs. A flicker of a memory— _her back against asphalt, her cheek against a woman’s skirt, the sky opening up blue above her._ It fades when Frank wraps his fingers in the hem of her dress. She is an anchor.

     She is programmed with directives and it is not in her to want. But she wants to lay her hand upon Frank’s cheek, so she does. His stubble is rough against her palm. Warmth swells in her, so strong she thinks it might fry all of her circuits.

     She bends herself down and rests her forehead against his. Frank’s eyes slip open. He sees her, but he does not see _her._ Athena wants him to know the truth of her and love her for it.

     “I’m an audio-animatronic,” she says. Her smile is shy. Behind her, Jane Grey’s neck drips blood.

     The next day, Athena watches Frank leave, his head down and shoulders stiff. She caught him before he left, as he was stuffing his things into his bags. His room was stripped bare. She asked him to stay. Told him that there was still work to be done. He ignored her. Athena stepped into his room, placed a hand upon his. “I’ll miss you, if you go.” Her voice shook.

     “You’re an animatronic,” Frank said. He would not look at her. “You don’t feel.” He shook off her hand and zipped up his duffel, then pushed past her. He did not bother to slam the door.

     She watches him step through the bridge-way. It closes up behind him and not once does he look back. There is pain in her chest, like her whole self is ripping in two. Athena feels it.

_Tomorrowland, 2013_

Governor Nix greets them—and it is Nix now, not David. David was a cold dreamer, but Nix is something different altogether. Athena is not sure when the change took place. He takes them to see Frank’s machine, to see if Casey is the stuff of miracles. And she is, even if David does not wish to see it.

     When possibility flickers across the screen—a second of life among destruction—Frank’s heart beat quickens. For a second, Athena learns what it is to hope.

     It all goes to shit in pieces. First, locked away in a white room, Casey curled in the corner and Frank sleeping on a table. Athena counts his breaths, watches the rise and fall of his chest. She doesn’t know what she would do if he did not wake up. But he does. It is easy for Athena to hide her relief, even as it roars through her. Second, after Casey’s burst on inspiration—“it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy. What you put out comes to pass.”— fails them. Nix, once a dreamer, has a mind set firmly in stone, and a thirst for violence. Not even Frank’s bomb can save them.

     And third, when Athena sees Frank shot, then turned to dust. The future. She jumps.

     Those seconds before the plasma beams hit stretch in front of her, as if time itself is dragging its feet. She sees the beam hit her chest before she feels it, sees a heart beating in her chest, as human as anything. Then Athena feels the heat and the pain, and she sees nothing but blue light.

_England, 1964_

It is warm and she feels the heat against her skin. The grass is cool against the soles of her feet. She’s running and each breath burns cold down her throat. A smile splits her face. Her father took a day off of work and her mother made a picnic lunch. They are in the countryside.

     Above her, cutting across the sky, is a plane. It flashes in the light. She chases after it, head tipped up and hand stretched to reach it. She hears her parents’ voices behind her, faint and drifting, calling out at her to be careful. She does not glance over shoulder to take in her parents’ faces, the warm smile of her father, or the soft eyes of her mother.

     She does not see the road, or the car, but she feels the impact.

_Tomorrowland, 2013_

 Frank’s arms are warm around her and her blood is warm on her chest. Her sternum has been ripped open, revealing the mess of wires and organs beneath. Sparks fly out into the night. Athena looks up at Frank and she is flooded with ideas—of what they could have been, if she was someone different, or if he was. Maybe then he could have kissed her at the World’s Fair, all those years ago. Maybe they could have been old together, or forever young.

     She’d played him her finals words, her last confession. _I love you, Frank Walker._ She’d given him her idea— _do not let me go to waste_ —not her first, but let him think that. Her heart beats loud at the thought and the tatters of her shirt dampen. Athena knows what she is now, the truth of it, and so does he. And he is holding her still.

     She is Man. She is Machine. A buzz of electricity. A tangle of wires. A warm feeling and a heart that beats. She already died once. To die again should not be so difficult a thing.

     One of Frank’s hands cups her shoulders and the other is tight around her calf. His jetpack is strapped to his back—not his first one, but _his_ none the less. Athena’s head falls back and she looks up at his face. Blinks.

     “I’ve figured out why you couldn’t make me laugh,” she says. Her voice is little more than a whisper.

     Frank’s finger’s tighten their grip. “Why’s that?” he asks.

     Athena smiles. “You’re not very funny.” And she laughs then, a tiny hiccup that pulls at the hole in her chest. Frank laughs too, a crumpled, broken sound.

     She doesn’t want this moment to end. She never wants to leave his arms. It isn’t fair to get him back, just to lose him again. But she swallows and says, “Goodbye, Frank.” She can feel each finger loosen their grip, feel the heat of his hands pull away. The absence is almost as bad as what follows.

     She falls. There is only cool air and the night sky and Frank, watching her go. There is the memory of a boy and a jetpack, of a word beside a world, of a time when she did not know what it was to feel. There is the World’s Fair. There is heat.

_Tomorrowland, 1964_

     Her eyes open. The room is white and a man is sitting beside her. She can count the hairs on his head and hear the shift of his bones beneath his skin. “I am David,” the man says. He stands and places a silver case in her lap. “And you are Athena.”

     She sits, jerky and slow— _correction: smoother, more speed, lift your head before your neck_ —and opens the case. Twelve pins gleam up at her. In her head, something shifts, clicks in place. She is born anew.

**Author's Note:**

> About the marking of the ship: I thought it would do Athena a disservice to eliminate her romantic feelings towards Frank. I tried to show how her feelings are merely romantic in intent, thus I eliminated any actual "pay out" (aka a kiss) beyond the emotional confession and Frank's acceptance of her.  
> As I was writing, I kept in mind the conflict between Athena's older mental age and her younger physical one, as well as her burgeoning humanity, when relating her feelings. I thought that, in fiction at least, this conflict of feeling, mind, and body was worth exploring. I hope I kept things tasteful.


End file.
